The GAA’s terrible, bad, no good week

A TWEET from Ciaran Deely on Tuesday morning caught our attention. Deely, in case you don’t know him, is the former manager of the London Gaelic footballers and is currently a sports scientist at Queens Park Rangers. The basic thrust of Deely’s tweet was that “14th Sept return is adequate time” to prepare for the last few rounds of the league and the championship and also that “Players who get knocked out of club c’ship early have enough maturity to continue their individual programmes”.

In less than 280 characters Deely expressed something that had been nagging away at us for a while: is all this training really necessary? Not being an inter-county coach or a player we kept our counsel, but here was a former county manager, a sports scientist with a professional football team no less, expressing sentiments that seemed to tally with our own.

There’s been a lot of sturm und drang this past week about the issue of inter-county training, with the suspicion being that some teams are training already or that they’re going to start training ahead of Croke Park’s September 14 date for the return to inter-county training.

It’s led to Croke Park and the to the Gaelic Players Association tying themselves in knots and contradictions. To begin with, while Croke Park was clear that it didn’t want anybody breaking the rule and returning to training before September 14, it declined to put any sanctions in place, which seemed a curious way to go about ensuring compliance. Then you had the GPA saying they backed the GAA in not wanting teams to return before the agreed date, but did want players to be insured even if teams were in contravention. That seemed like a massive contradiction, but you have to understand that the GPA were simply looking out for their member’s interests and well-being.

All the same it contributed to this notion that the GAA were not remotely on top of this issue. It wasn’t until their clarification at the weekend that counties found in breach of the regulations could find themselves out of the championship that Croke Park seemed to be wrestling back control. For us though the issue isn’t with the GAA and whatever rules and regulations they’ve designed, the issue lies with county teams and county managers and the training arms race that’s broken out over the last twenty or thirty years. Is it necessary? Is it even counter-productive? A debate and a reckoning needs to be had, maybe Covid-19 has done us a favour by shining a light on all of this.